The headlines are always payrolls and then the unemployment rate, but more often than not the details under the surface of those two headlines tell a better story than just those headlines and alongside the uptick in wage growth was actually another move down in hours worked.

I'm Mary Long and that's Liz and Saunders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. Dieder Willard caught up with Saunders to go beyond the economic headlines.

They discuss holiday spending and the ascent of Buy Now Pay Later, the rise of part-time work,

and why investors should be careful when drawing conclusions from past averages.

Well, let's start by looking a little bit back at 2023

and sort of just a quick thing

about what surprised you most about the year.

Well, coming into the year,

there was a decent amount of momentum associated with what's called the average stock, you know,

equal weight doing fairly well relative to cap weight, and we had expected that to persist a bit more into the year.

And I think the really what prompted what became an incredibly concentrated market

with rightly so all the attention on the Magnificent 7 and just how dominant they became that

really started in mid-March not coincidentally at the same timing as the banking

crisis and I think that that initially just fueled an interest

in the mega cap companies that had strong balance sheets

that weren't going to be at the mercy

of any significant problems in the financial system, which that didn't become a

contagious event, of course, and then it was, I guess, exacerbated by all of the interest in AI. So it was that that concentration kicked in

in such rapid fashion and persisted throughout the year

was the biggest market surprise.

Obviously, geopolitics these days, the, you know, Israel-Hamass

war was the biggest external surprise.

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